The term “Pop”  first appeared in an article by the English art critic Lawrence Alloway in 1958.  The collaboration of the group known as the Independent Group in London was creating the new interest in popular culture and the attempt to make art out of it.  The interest was in the growing mass culture of movies, advertising, science fiction, consumerism, and new technologies originating in America.

An artist who emerged in New York in a number of solo exhibitions in 1961 and 1962 was Andy Warhol.  He received notoriety when he exhibited paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes.  by 1963 he was mass producing these purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silk screen prints, he then began printing endless portraits of celebrities in garish colors.  Warhol’s works placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in America.